Edit: obligatory explanation (thanks mods for squaring me away)…
What you see via the UI isn’t “all that exists”. Unlike Reddit, where everything is a black box, there are a lot more eyeballs who can see “under the hood”. Any instance admin, proper or rogue, gets a ton of information that users won’t normally see. The attached example demonstrates that while users will only see upvote/downvote tallies, admins can see who actually performed those actions.
Edit: To clarify, not just YOUR instance admin gets this info. This is ANY instance admin across the Fediverse.
Reddit would have to keep that info on downvotes stored, right? If they didn’t, it should be trivial to mass downvote something with very few users
Reddit definitely stores upvoters and downvoters of each comment, otherwise it won’t remember which comments you have downvoted.
Yeah, up/downvotes are somehow has to be tied to the user. If not, a page refresh should “reset” the state and you would be able to vote again.